


Time to Face the Strange

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alien Genders, Alien anatomy, Established Relationship, Friendship, M/M, Mpreg, Parenting in Wartime, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 20:26:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13015497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: Finn and Poe are having a baby.





	Time to Face the Strange

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gloss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/gifts).



> In this version of the galaxy far far away, the people designated “humans” are more or less intersex (a rough analogue, because aliens) most of the time, except when they're aroused. During that process, their genital configuration shifts either outward or inward, and the nerve endings that allow for sexual pleasure become highly sensitized. If one partner conceives, their body adjusts further and for a longer time to carry, bear and (if they want to) nurse the child.The same person can have different configurations at different times, and the same one or a different one than their partner of the moment. Humans in this world have roughly the same range of gender states and presentations as humans in ours—which is to say, multifarious, some fixed and some fluid. 
> 
> I'm freely adapting this way of being from Ursula K. LeGuin's Gethenians, who populate her novel _The Left Hand of Darkness._ I recommend reading it if you haven't already—not so much for its ideas about gender and bodies, which are still somewhat narrow and essentialist on other axes, but for what it shows us about strangeness and being a stranger, and courage, and loneliness and grief, and friendship and love. 
> 
> This is partly Oscar Isaac's fault—from that interview, you know the one—but not entirely. The worlds we can imagine arise partly from what we can already see. They also arise from what we've seen others imagine, and my debt to LeGuin in this, as in much of my writing, is boundless. So, too, my debt to Gloss, to whom this story is dedicated, and by whose writing and friendship it is shaped.

“That's Dameron for you, late to meet his own kid,” someone's saying, and there's the thud of elbow against carapace and another voice hissing, “The squadrons are up, asshole.” Immense effort drains out of Finn's body, and pain starts to seep in. He hates it when people talk about him like he can't understand. That hasn't changed.

“Could someone give me my baby?” he asks, and the medic snorts out a startled laugh. Someone pulls the thermal blanket away from his chest--“Skin to skin, that's what you need--” and there's a warm, damp, downy weight. Small. Much smaller than he expected.

It's not that the pain goes away, but it becomes  less important.

“Holy shit,” Finn says, softly, without enough breath, looking down at the baby's cone-shaped head and their puffy, smeared little face. He tries to breathe deeper, and the baby breathes too. Then they do that yowl-bleating sound he's only ever heard in the prenatal instructional holos, and he feels _frantic._ What do they need? How can he help?

“Try feeding them,” the medic suggests. “They could probably use it. It's a lot of work being born.” She helps him position the baby a little better, and Finn feels a surge of every emotion at once as his milk lets down. “A good latch!” the medic says approvingly. “That's going to make your life a lot easier.” But her voice is distant. The rest of the galaxy is far away, and Finn and the baby are spinning slowly at the center. “Holy shit,” he says again, his voice sounding distant too, and slow. “Why didn't anyone tell me this was _terrifying._ ”

 

 

*

 

Finn can say truthfully that he didn't know what he was getting into. But he can't say he didn't know he was getting into it.

He and Poe were making out, as they often were--often and not often enough, in both of their opinions. They were a good hour in and Poe was lengthening and hardening against Finn's thigh, and while that sometimes drew Finn along with him, that day he felt himself flexing and opening and getting wet. He undid his trousers and brought Poe's hand down so he could feel, relished Poe's wide delighted grin, leaned into his kisses and the quick deft movements of his hand. “Harder,” Finn said, “Fuck me, c'mon--”

“Like this? Or?”

“I want your dick.” Poe had three fingers in him by that point, twisting and pressing, and it was good but he wanted that very _specific_ feeling, wanted it so much that he kept raising his hips off the bed to meet the thrusts of Poe's hand.

“If you ask for it again you can have it.”

“Fuck.” Another finger and Finn was panting, felt the sweat spring up at his hairline.

“Yeah, eventually, but ask.”

“You're such a— _fine,_ I want your dick in me.” He'd meant to add, “You happy?” but Poe had ducked down to lick around where his hand was and all Finn could do was squirm and breathe.

They readjusted and Poe slid into him, eyes crossing just a little bit when he was fully in (something Finn loved and would never, ever tell him about), and then they were just moving together the way they knew how, driving toward each other, almost there--

“Come in me this time,” Finn said hoarsely.

Poe looked at him, suddenly even _more_ present, if that was possible: focused, intent, clear. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Finn said, not out of control anymore, “please,” not begging, but _wanting,_ as Poe rocked in and dragged out, slower now, deliberate, holding back. To think, and to decide. Finn moved against him, around him, asked, “You ready?”

“Yeah,” Poe said, “yeah, Finn,” speeding up, letting go, coming with a hoarse cry, dropping his head to Finn's sweaty shoulder.

And so when he got the results of the first blood draw, and through the days when it felt like his stomach was crowding back up into his esophagus, when the kid kicked him right in the kidney during a briefing, through the nights when he was getting up to piss three or four times until Poe commandeered a bucket with a tight-fitting lid, through the weirdness of having a cunt _all the time,_ through the unpleasantly vivid dreams and the straight-up daymares about raising a child in the galaxy as it is and as he was trying to prevent it from becoming, he did remember it: that they looked each other right in the eye, and questioned, and embarked.

 

*

 

The remnants of the New Republic fleet, when the destruction of the Hosnian System brought them shrieking back from all the arms of the galaxy, made it possible for the Resistance to mount a few blockades. Finn was leading the team choosing the locations, and he planned to work as long as he could. But reading up on the range of psychological and physiological changes he could expect, he felt like he'd better tell his team as soon as he was sure it was really happening. And then it was to be expected that Poe would tell his squadrons: “We tell each other _everything,”_ he'd said earnestly, which Finn knew wasn't true, but he didn't have the energy to argue.

The pilots reacted predictably: lots of whooping and hollering and variations on, “You guys are gonna make a _pretty_ baby,” and assurances that _one_ drink wouldn't hurt. Finn's team's reactions were more of a mix: a slow blink from Dorcas, a shruglike gesture of pseudopodia from Rsuu (who, to be fair, budded off a daughter every solar cycle and had already sent two strategists as brilliant as herself to Resistance outposts), bluff congratulations from the Mon Calamari veteran Puriik and a choked sound from Rose Tico, who quickly composed her expression when Finn looked her way.

They made plans for what to do if the effects were worse than he expected: “After all,” Dorcas pointed out, “you could get sick, or injured, or killed, even if you weren't pregnant. We all need to be replaceable.”

Sometimes Dorcas thought a little too much like a stormtrooper for Finn's comfort, though she'd never been one, and sometimes he found it very comforting. It was helpful here, and they moved into the discussion of roles and responsibilities and who'd understudy whom in which cases if and when that they'd been needing to have anyway. They were able to get that done and make a shortlist to take home and research further, and Finn had almost forgotten about Rose's reaction when he got up to leave and had to breathe through a dizzy spell.

She was at his elbow. “Me too,” she said. 

“You too, what?” Oh. “You too—you and Jess?”

“Me and Jess! And whoever this is! I just saw the medtech two days ago! Can I hug you?” He nodded, which made the world sway a little. His body hadn't changed shape much to look at, yet, but with her pressing against him, his skin felt tight and strange. “Are you scared?” she was asking.

“Some. Yeah.” But he was used to being scared, and doing what he needed to do while scared. He'd been doing that for a while now. It shouldn't be a problem.

“You can talk to me,” she said. “If you get scared, come and talk to me.”

That isn't how it goes, he caught himself thinking. You don't tell _anyone._

But those were old thoughts. He talked to Poe now when he was scared—well, sometimes—and Rey, when he could reach her on the encrypted channel, and the mindhealer he saw every now and then when he felt like things were getting to be too much, the one he started seeing after Paige and Ister died. “I will,” he said, and remembered another thing that people do: “You too, okay?”

“Okay. Shit, I promised Jess I'd eat with her, I'll see you later.” At the door, she turned, and beamed.

People hadn't reacted this way to him since he came back from his first undercover mission—no, since he first woke up from the coma. After the mission, they'd celebrated him and Rose the way they'd praise anybody who'd made a good hit and come back alive. For a couple of weeks after the news of their pregnancies spread, the two of them were the base's darlings. It seemed incredible that no one in the Resistance had gotten knocked up since its mustering, but he learned later from the General that the few people who did had mustered out. “Oh, I don't blame them,” she said. “It's hard to raise children anytime. In wartime--”

He didn't say, _It's wartime wherever they are,_ because she knew.

He didn't ask, _Was it hard for you?_ because he wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer.

“We'll be _great_ parents,” Poe said firmly when he brought it up. “Look at my mom. She popped me out and hopped right back in the cockpit. Won the Battle of Endor and got back before I had time to miss her.” Later on, leaning against each other in the dark after night maneuvers and passing a joint back and forth, he admitted that he was full of shit. “I tell myself stories sometimes,” he said.

“Yeah, I know.” Finn's own mind didn't work that way. He didn't try to convince himself; he just circled around and around the thought he couldn't stand to have but had to have, getting nowhere. Poe knew that about him, just as he knew he could wait for Poe to run out of protective stories and get eventually to the one that was true, or close. Close enough to be going on with. He hauled at Poe's shoulder, not roughly, but with intent, and Poe turned enough for them to kiss. Finn sucked on Poe's tongue, bit at his mouth, gripped him tight.

Poe wasn't treating him like a delicate miracle; he rubbed selva oil on Finn's belly the same way he'd once rubbed it on his back, and that was that, although at one point when he was going down on Finn he paused and said wonderingly, “You're gonna push a _baby_ out of there,” so that Finn had to threaten to crush Poe's head with his thighs until he put his mouth back where it was supposed to be.

Finn's cock would be out of commission till the baby was born—longer if he decided to breastfeed, something he was still on the fence about—but there were compensations. His nipples, where he'd always liked teeth or a rough hand, were now so sensitive that all Poe had to do was breathe _across_ them, not even directly on them. The upside of having a cunt all the time was that he was ready to go as soon as Poe was, and if Poe wasn't, Finn still didn't mind the time getting him ready, sitting on their bed and holding Poe's hips, licking and biting his stomach, his thighs, turning him and spreading both cheeks to lick at his asshole, until Poe's body decided what it wanted to do.

Another month along and Poe rode his hand, four fingers palm-deep, sweating and cursing it out, cracking Finn's knuckles for him, and when he had enough breath back to speak he raised an eyebrow at Finn and said, “What now?”

“Now I want you to eat me out again until I tell you to stop.”

“You planning on telling me to stop?”

“I mean,” Finn said, “eventually.”

Other days it was like his body had never even heard of sex, and they'd just talk. Practicalities. Who to ask about being a parent of record if the war took them both out. Whether they'd take leave at the same time or stagger it. Where the baby would sleep. It was unsettling to Finn that they could make these plans as though they were all the same kind of plan, as though one didn't depend on the nonexistence of all the others, though this didn't bother him in his work, or in all the other parts of his life where he had to plan.

Emnu Arre the mindhealer told him that it was good for people to talk and think about the kinds of parents that they want to be, “Even if you change your minds later, or forget, or things turn out not to apply.” This made some sense to Finn—sometimes, you can't follow through on a tactic as planned, and you have to change your path to the objective, and somes the objective switches to “getting out alive,” whatever it was before. But he couldn't help saying, “I wasn't a kid, really. I don't really know what—kids are.”

Emnu Arre looked at him over amplifying lenses: steady, patient. “Well, I have a question and a suggestion. The question is: how could you find out? And the suggestion is: think about how _you_ want to behave, however you were treated, whatever happened to you, because the good news is you don't have to be a kid. You have to be a parent.”

“You're good at this,” he said, at the end of that session. Zie smiled, but it was a bitter smile. “This is what I did,” zie said. “Back on Coruscant, before the war. Posh clients in a big 80th-floor office, the free clinic four times a tenday, all parenting stuff. I learned the other stuff the hard way, on the job.”

Poe liked to talk about his own childhood—could go for hours, Finn already knew, and Poe already knew he didn't mind it and was good at taking Finn's questions into the stride of his stories. So it was easy, surprisingly easy, instead of asking, “What's a goat-lizard?” or “Why'd you get in trouble for saying that?” to ask, “Is that what you'd want to do if they do something wrong?” And then they'd bat it back and forth, thinking it out together, while Poe did some kind of mending or tinkering to keep his hands busy. Finn could always tell when it was getting flimsy, too hypothetical, nothing to hang a real plan on. Sometimes he'd try to bring it back, but mostly he'd lean over the sea of bits and pieces that surrounded Poe like an asteroid belt when he was working on something, and kiss him, deep lasting kisses. “You don't think it's a good idea,” Poe said after one of these. “I can tell.”

“I don't think it's a good idea, no. But--”

“But you don't want to fight about whether it is or it isn't,” Poe said, quick as always, just a little way ahead, and Finn leaned back in and sighed against his mouth.

After his injury he'd learned to sleep on his stomach, which was definitively no longer an option. So when they moved over to the bed, he lay with Poe's head on his shoulder until that arm lost circulation, at which point he rolled Poe off and waited for him to snore and settle and sort of bulge-curled against his back, and tried to breathe himself to sleep while hormones and muscles and fluids and the new, growing almost-person rearranged everything inside him.

In a way it _was_ like recovering from his injury: the changes to his body were so insistent, so absorbing, that they crowded out other things. Four tendays to go, give or take, and he and Rose sat across a table with a data projection between them, trousers rolled up to the knee and feet sharing the bucket of ice water. “Is it helping?” she inquired.

“Maybe. Probably.” He couldn't tell if the absence of pain meant the swelling was down or if his ankles were just numb. “Yeah, I think it's definitely helping.” They'd established that her nausea was worse at the beginning, and his heartburn was worse now. They also were about two-thirds of the way through her report on a new pattern of First Order fleet movements, and he reminded her that they ought to finish it up.

They did, but both of them had also found that their concentration was suffering, and the water went from cold to barely cool before they were through. While they were stomping on a towel to dry the feet they couldn't reach, Rose muttered, “I told Jess she'll have to carry the next one.”

“The _next_ one,” Finn said.

Rose grinned. “There were nine kids and four grownups in my core family. Five, before Aziz died. And before--” Her mouth tightened in a way he recognized, and he waited for the wave of grief to pass. She'd already told him about the plan to name the baby Paige. Now, equilibrium recovered, she was going on: “That was pretty average for our world, or my part of it anyway. I never told you that?”

“Someone did this _nine_ times?”

“No! Of course not. I was my dad's third birth kid. I can't remember about everybody else.”

Even three felt like an awful lot to Finn. He and Poe had agreed that this would be their only one, even if they were to live long enough to make another. “You want that many?”

Rose turned serious. “I don't know,” she said. “Wanting something—I mean, how can you know? I want what I hope it would be like. I want to be with Jessika. And with our kids, yeah. And anyone else we fall in love with. In peace. So I guess we have a war to win, first.”

It wasn't like he hadn't been thinking about that. Not even that one or both of them could die, probably would: they'd talked about that, planned for it. It was the sheer volume of death and waste spread out around them, left in their wake. Enslavement and genocide, not just one orphan but whole generations. The galaxy as it was. The way of things.

He thought about it all the way back to their quarters, where he stood at the shelf he used for a desk, tired and blank, reading the same lines of intel over and over, until Poe came up behind him and tucked his arms under Finn's like parachute straps and crooned, “I'm the jetpack of lo-ove,” and kissed Finn's neck, and that was the way of things, too. The squadrons were scheduled for departure, acting on Rose's findings, but they had the night together.

“Is it worse now?” Finn found himself asking as they got ready for bed. He was too tired for sex and Poe was too jumpy. “Leaving, I mean.”

“No. It's just the same. Which, I mean, isn't great. But I'm leaving _you._ Maybe after I meet them it'll be,” and he stopped. Didn't look at Finn; looked at a spot on the bed to the left of Finn's hip, for a long time. “Was this a bad idea?” he asked, finally.

It sunk into Finn's heart like a blade in slow motion, and for a second—just a second, no more, but it was staggering—he wished he were dead. Were nothing. Free of effort, free of possibility. Like being a stormtrooper, but more so.

It passed, and he let himself look up, look Poe in the face.

“It doesn't matter,” he said, and he heaved himself up, stood so that their eyes were level. “Anymore. What kind of idea it is.” He was speaking very slowly. He wanted _himself_ to understand. “It matters if you're,” he said. “If we're with each other.”

“Yeah,” Poe said, and they stood there together until Finn said, “Hips, gotta sit down, sorry,” and Poe helped him lower himself to the bed.

There was the person he was making, and there was the world they were making. The process they'd set in motion, that they'd committed themselves to—they were in it now.

 

*

 

On baby Solo's eighteenth day, Poe makes it home.

They haven't been great days. Finn's on parental leave, there's nothing he has to do but feed Solo and keep them clean and help them sleep. But the truth is that neither of them sleep much, and the other two things take all his energy. People come in and bring food, or hold Solo so Finn can bathe or change his clothes, and then they leave again.

If he weren't so anxious he'd be much more bored, and if he weren't so tired he'd be much more anxious, but the anxiety is plenty bad enough, until day nine when he tells Dr. Kalonia he's scared that he's going to accidentally suffocate Solo by wrapping them into the sling too tightly. She narrows her eyes and says, “How scared,” and when he tells her, she gives him a ten-pack of stims--“They can't get into your milk, I know you're running disaster scenarios right now but you have to trust me”--and runs him through a set of biofeedback techniques.

The combination works pretty well, and by day thirteen he's free to be just regular-anxious about Poe coming back, which is still pretty fucking anxious. At least now holding Solo helps, instead of freaking Finn out. They are indeed a pretty baby: the flush and swelling have subsided, leaving their skin a soft brown and their lips incredibly detailed and their eyes wide and luminous and their hair a little patch of curls just at the very top, with fine down on the back and sides of their head. And he's _learning_ them, their cries and expressions, their patterns of need. Finn loves to learn. He loves his baby. It's just that his body's a mess, and he smells weird to himself, and he's not making enough milk and has to supplement with syntholact, and he misses Poe and he misses being able to follow a train of thought all the way to the end, and he cries all the time, and he's so tired.

They're dozing together on the couch, under a blanket with at least two incidents of spit-up on it, when a sound wakes him. Poe is standing there, flight suit and all, his jaw slack until the second he realizes that Finn's looking back at him, tears already streaming down.

“Don't get up,” Poe says, and kneels on the floor, and gets his scratchy orange arms around both of them as best he can.

 

*

 

When Finn was pregnant, he'd have dreams of fighting Phasma again, or Kylo Ren, or General Hux, with a baby strapped to his back. Sometimes the baby was a Nautolan or a Gungan, sometimes a human with Poe's eyes. Sometimes a blow from his opponent knocked them bleeding into the snow. Sometimes giants tore them away from him, with both of them sobbing. Sometimes he won the fight, unwound the sling and held them in shaking hands, and sometimes they were alive, and sometimes they were a bundle of rags.

It's not like any of that. Phasma is dead, of course, and Kylo Ren is lost in his own mind. Finn helps to draft the terms of Hux's surrender. At the end of the session, not the first and not the last, he tromps across the slender walkway they've built over this moon's sea of mud. Rose's theory is that they picked a site for the negotiations that everyone would hate, so that everyone would want to wrap them up as quickly as possible.

Rose looks up when he enters the barracks. “Reinforcements,” Finn says, squatting down on the floor to open his arms for Solo, who gives him one suspicious look and then snuggles close.

“Thank fu--” Rose starts in a heartfelt tone, glances at the babies, and switches it to, “Thank the _Force,_ I mean. Why is it that two is so much more than two times one?”

“They seem pretty okay now.” Paige has trundled over, wanting to get in on the hug action.

“You should've seen them earlier, when Paigey had their teeth sunk in Solo's arm.” Paige shrieks with glee. “It's not _funny,”_ Rose groans.

“What'd Solo do?” Finn settles in and makes a lap, lips against Solo's curls, and Paige plays with his bootlaces.

“Smacked them, and then they both started screaming.”

Finn sighs. “I guess we're not really in a position to tell our kids not to solve their problems with violence.”

“That was after I practically had to pry Solo off the top of the light fixture, which was after I had to get them down from the windowsill. That's definitely Poe's kid. Jess said they'd be getting back tonight, is that still true?”

“I know what you know.” Finn reaches down and extracts the end of a bootlace from Paige's mouth. “No thank you,” he says gently, and Paige wails for approximately three seconds before getting distracted by the other boot. The pilots have been on convoy duty, ferrying supplies to the bases seized and held by rebel stormtroopers, a critical turning point in the war, a hint of a new world on the way. He and Poe have been checking in by voice each night, and each night Finn holds Solo up to the audio output to hear their lullaby.

 


End file.
